Ireland’s first grass-fed biorefinery hits the road to help farmers go green
Along the windy west coast of Ireland a biorefinery on wheels is turning grass into a series of different green products that could give farmers a more diversified source of income. “This is Ireland’s first grass-fed biorefinery,” said James Gaffey, a researcher at the University of Tralee in county Kerry which is leading the project. “And it’s the first step looking at grass-based bioeconomy options for Ireland.” The bioeconomy is a concept that uses renewable resources from nature or organic waste and turns them into valuable new products. The EU see the bioeconomy as a key strategy to address some of the most pressing environmental challenges. In Ireland, where agriculture accounts for over a third of its emissions, the biorefinery is being trialled as a solution to improve the farming sector’s sustainability. “We’re the only country in Europe with over 50% of grassland,” said Gaffey, adding that this ready supply provides plenty for the biorefinery to work with, which it separates into a juice and a fibre. The juice is turned into a dry protein-rich cake that can be absorbed easier by cows so it generates less emissions from their digestion process or from feeding them other feed, like soy beans imported from Brazil. “We could improve the overall protein availability per hectare [of grass] by around 40%,” said Gaffey. “That can improve the availability on indigenous non-GMO (genetically modified) protein.” This could translate into a reduced demand from Ireland, and the EU, on imported soy as an animal feed, which is one of the main commodities driving deforestation in South America as well as a key source of greenhouse gas emissions. Because of this potential, the biorefinery project is working directly with a cooperative of farmers in the west of Ireland. The idea is to keep control in their hands rather than hand over the power to big agrifood businesses. “80% of the jobs the bioeconomy will create will be in rural communities,” said Gaffey. “We need to think about how to frame the bioeconomy to really make an impact.” A lot of sectors and businesses are already a part of the bioeconomy, but they don’t realise it yet, according to Nikolaos Ntavos, a manager at the bioenergy and environment business cluster of western Macedonia, or CLUBE. This, he says, prevents them taking advantage of the opportunities it presents as well as from accessing the available bioeconomy funds and support services available to them. “This is not helpful for the bioeconomy to evolve and grow,” he said. *Creating scale, stimulating a new wave of entrepreneurship* CLUBE is a member of the EU-wide RUBIZMO project, which is a collection of clusters aiming to stimulate similar bioeconomy businesses and entrepreneurs elsewhere. If fully utilised the EU thinks the bioeconomy could create an additional one million jobs by 2030, generally in rural or coastal areas where employment is needed to curb the exodus of its people to cities. Ntavos is working with different businesses in Macedonia and Greece to help them reinvent their business models and drive the bioeconomy forward. One example is a food cooperative that recently joined CLUBE, together they are trying to find ways to make new products from their food waste – like peelings, rotten leftovers and kernels. “We are trying to link our SMEs (small- and medium- enterprises) with the R&D institutes in the area of bioeconomy to help them collaborate and make more innovative products,” said Ntavos. This could have a huge impact in many areas of northern Greece and Macedonia where there is a lot waste leftover from agricultural production, like wine, olive oil, cereals and fruit production, as well as forestry.
Keywords
bioeconomy, agritech, environment, rural, entrepreneurship